20th Century Fox | 2009 | 92 mins. | Not Rated
If I’m not mistaken, back sometime in the mid-nineties Joe Bob Briggs use to host (he may have had a female co-host) weekly slasher movie nights on the USA network. Of course, this was before USA started running reruns of the various Law & Order shows on a seemingly continuous reel. Anyway, Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead reminds me of the slasher flicks that used to show up on USA—bad acting, cheap scares, and gratuitous bloodletting. In the case of Wrong Turn 3, there are a few scenes that would undoubtedly be considered to disturbing for television. What hurts the movie most though, is that the filmmakers seem more concerned with developing an actual plot, than having any fun.
The film starts out just the way we film fans tend to like our slasher flicks; with the kind of cliché opening that just seems to get these movies off on the right foot. But once the horny teens are killed in the opening moments, it’s as if someone let all the humor out of the story and the film only gets worse from there.
The set up for Wrong Turn 3 is more like an action movie than shock horror. Essentially, a group of prisoners are being transferred when their bus is hijacked. Three-Finger, the surviving mutant from the second film, runs the bus off the road with his tow truck. Among the convicts is a Mexican drug-lord type, a skinhead, a carjacker, an undercover fed and a one-time soldier who insists he’s innocent. During the course of the hijacking the bus crashes, people die, the convicts take control, creating a hostage situation for the remaining police officers.
Surprise! Surprise! The cons just happen to stumble upon an overturned bread truck filled with millions of dollars…in the middle of the woods. They’ll be rich, if they can only make it out of the woods alive. The prisoners do their best to struggle through the woods while lugging bags of money and avoid each other (they are all chained together). All the while, the cons have to avoid Three-Finger, who seems to be everywhere at once, with a new trap in tow.
Predictably, one by one, heroes and villains are killed off in gruesome, uninventive ways. The gore factor is okay, but there isn’t as much of it as one would expect from this kind of film, and frankly, aside from the opening scene, none of the kills are inventive. A film like this screams for over-the-top ridiculousness, purely for the gorehounds of the world. Instead, director Declan O’Brien (Rock Monster) apparently decided to take himself seriously and create a real story where there wasn’t one. As a result, what we end up with is a total misfire.
The film’s 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is coated with a thick spackling of grain that’s especially prevalent during the nighttime scenes, which constitute almost the entirety of the run-time. Wrong Turn 3’s look is generally soft, with poor contrast and dull colors. This one’s not really a great looking blu-ray.
Wrong Turn 3 comes with a fairly unimpressive 24-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. Thr dialogue is solid, but any surround activity is almost nonexistent; there is some at the low end, but it’s far from a truly immersive experience.
Wrong Turn 3 also offers Dolby Digital 5.1 dubs in French and Spanish. Subtitles are available in English (SDH), Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Korean.
Wrong Turn 3 includes two forgettable special features
• Wrong Turn 3 in 3 Fingers…I Mean, Parts (SD) Action, Gore, and Chaos (SD, 9:10) is a guided look at the stunt sequences by way of director Declan O’Brien, Brothers in Blood (SD, 5:23) features brief interviews with all the actors, and Three Finger’s Fight Night (SD, 3:34) is all about the choreography of the fight sequences.
• Deleted Scenes (SD, 1:24) You’ll likely be glad these two scenes were cut.
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